Running Jerusalem

The Holy City's marathon is as tough as its mayor, who designed the course.

Try to imagine a more challenging city to govern than Jerusalem. The place has been sacked, attacked, captured and besieged. It's been divided. It contains some of the holiest sites for three major religions. Whatever your politics, you might agree a person would have to be nuts to want to be mayor of such a vexed and contested place.

Mayor Nir Barkat does not appear crazy. He speaks in the controversy-averse sound bites of a politician and smells of rich businessman. An exaggerated eye blink, maybe a facial tic, serves to make him seem approachable and endearing.

Like ex-NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, Barkat doesn't need the job. He earned serious coin in high tech and receives an annual salary of one shekel. Before being elected mayor, Barkat appeared on the Israeli version of the TV reality show "Shark Tank." The son of an athletic physicist, he majored in computer science and then went into the Israeli army, where he served beyond his mandatory three-year term and reached the rank of major. "Through sport," he told a handful of international journalists, "you become a better thinker." In addition to his interest in basketball and running, he's also passionate about Formula One racing.

On his 50th birthday, in 2009, Barkat ran the New York City Marathon surrounded by paratroopers he'd led in the Israel Defense Forces. He was doing reconnaissance: Barkat had worked to create a marathon in Jerusalem, so he had an eye out for details. Asked an obvious question about security the day before the fourth running of his hometown race, he said, "We are alert all day, every day."

When the mayor claimed he had designed the course himself, I wondered if it was like saying he'd invented the Internet. After 42 kilometers, I believed only someone who thought governing Jerusalem would be fun could have come up with that course, the most difficult urban marathon I've ever run. My Garmin profile looked like an EKG: nothing flat, few straight sections and a total elevation gain/loss of around 2,300 feet.

Starting at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, the course loops around the Giv'at Ram campus of the Hebrew University, peers down on the Valley of the Cross and winds through wealthy neighborhoods. "That's Bibi's house," said Issi, my pace-group leader, as he pointed toward the home of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A few miles later, we passed the fence securing the residence of Shimon Peres, Israel's president.

The course went along the "green line," the demarcation between the Israeli and Palestinian sections of the city, and climbed to Mount Scopus, where unprintable hip-hop lyrics blasting from boomboxes confirmed we were on the main campus of Hebrew University. We looked across the Judean Desert to Jordan.

We streamed into the Old City, up narrow, slippery streets of the Armenian Quarter and out the Zion Gate. A couple of mentally punishing out-and-backs and we finished in a municipal park buzzing with fitness buffs.

That morning I spent hours feeling at home with Israeli marathoners who directed my attention to sites, told me of their lives and bantered like my Sunday morning run friends. Sivan, the only other woman running with the group, invited me to visit her kibbutz, and when I asked about security, Orel, a young attorney running his first marathon, reminded me that most of the field had done military service. They were tough, disciplined, well-trained and not even a little whiny.

While in Jerusalem, what I heard most often when talking to people about "the Situation in the Middle East" was "It's complicated." I had come to Israel without strong political feelings and listened gratefully to diverse voices. On a 26.2-mile tour of the city--beige, ancient, holy, hurt, torn, divisive, challenging--I thought the mayor had found the perfect way to represent it.

Rachel Toor, author of Personal Record: A Love Affair with Running, teaches writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.